Enemies Of The State Tal Bauer Epub
Jacque Waiden
Bruno Bauer replies to them: No one in Germany is politicallyemancipated. We ourselves are not free. How are we to free you? You Jewsare egoists if you demand a special emancipation for yourselvesas Jews. As Germans, you ought to work for the political emancipation ofGermany, and as human beings, for the emancipation of mankind, and youshould feel the particular kind of your oppression and your shame not asan exception to the rule, but on the contrary as a confirmation of therule.
Or do the Jews demand the same status as Christian subjectsof the state? In that case, they recognize that the Christian stateis justified and they recognize, too, the regime of general oppression.Why should they disapprove of their special yoke if they approve of thegeneral yoke? Why should the German be interested in the liberation ofthe Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?
The Christian state knows only privileges. In thisstate, the Jew has the privilege of being a Jew. As a Jew, he has rightswhich the Christians do not have. Why should he want rights which he doesnot have, but which the Christians enjoy?
In wanting to be emancipated from the Christian state, the Jewis demanding that the Christian state should give up its religiousprejudice. Does he, the Jew, give up his religious prejudice? Hashe, then, the right to demand that someone else should renounce his religion?
By its very nature, the Christian state is incapable of emancipatingthe Jew; but, adds Bauer, by his very nature the Jew cannot be emancipated.So long as the state is Christian and the Jew is Jewish, the one is asincapable of granting emancipation as the other is of receiving it.
On what grounds, then, do you Jews want emancipation? On accountof your religion? It is the mortal enemy of the state religion. As citizens?In Germany, there are no citizens. As human beings? But you are no morehuman beings than those to whom you appeal.
How, then, does Bauer solve the Jewish question? What is the result?The formulation of a question is its solution. The critique of the Jewishquestion is the answer to the Jewish question. The summary, therefore,is as follows:
The most rigid form of the opposition between the Jew and theChristian is the religious opposition. How is an opposition resolved?By making it impossible. How is religious opposition made impossible? Byabolishing religion. As soon as Jew and Christian recognize thattheir respective religions are no more than different stages in thedevelopment of the human mind, different snake skins cast off by history,and that man is the snake who sloughed them, the relation of Jew and Christianis no longer religious but is only a critical, scientific, and humanrelation. Science, then, constitutes their unity. But, contradictionsin science are resolved by science itself.
In France, a constitutional state, the Jewish questionis a question of constitutionalism, the question of the incompletenessof political emancipation. Since the semblance of a state religionis retained here, although in a meaningless and self-contradictory formula,that of a religion of the majority, the relation of the Jew to thestate retains the semblance of a religious, theological opposition.
The limits of political emancipation are evident at once fromthe fact that the state can free itself from a restriction without manbeing really free from this restriction, that the state can be a freestate [pun on word Freistaat, which also means republic] withoutman being a free man. Bauer himself tacitly admits this when helays down the following condition for political emancipation:
The political elevation of man above religion shares all the defectsand all the advantages of political elevation in general. The state asa state annuls, for instance, private property, man declares by politicalmeans that private property is abolished as soon as the property qualificationfor the right to elect or be elected is abolished, as has occurred in manystates of North America. Hamilton quite correctly interprets this factfrom a political point of view as meaning:
Political emancipation is, of course, a big step forward. True,it is not the final form of human emancipation in general, but it is thefinal form of human emancipation within the hitherto existing world order.It goes without saying that we are speaking here of real, practical emancipation.
The decomposition of man into Jew and citizen, Protestant andcitizen, religious man and citizen, is neither a deception directed againstcitizenhood, nor is it a circumvention of political emancipation, it ispolitical emancipation itself, the political method of emancipating oneselffrom religion. Of course, in periods when the political state as such isborn violently out of civil society, when political liberation is the formin which men strive to achieve their liberation, the state can and mustgo as far as the abolition of religion, the destruction of religion. Butit can do so only in the same way that it proceeds to the abolition ofprivate property, to the maximum, to confiscation, to progressive taxation,just as it goes as far as the abolition of life, the guillotine. At timesof special self-confidence, political life seeks to suppress its prerequisite,civil society and the elements composing this society, and to constituteitself as the real species-life of man, devoid of contradictions. But,it can achieve this only by coming into violent contradiction withits own conditions of life, only by declaring the revolution to be permanent,and, therefore, the political drama necessarily ends with the re-establishmentof religion, private property, and all elements of civil society, justas war ends with peace.
It is, indeed, estrangement which matters in the so-calledChristian state, but not man. The only man who counts, the king, is a beingspecifically different from other men, and is, moreover, a religious being,directly linked with heaven, with God. The relationships which prevailhere are still relationships dependent of faith. The religious spirit,therefore, is still not really secularized.
But, furthermore, the religious spirit cannot be reallysecularized, for what is it in itself but the non-secular form of a stagein the development of the human mind? The religious spirit can only besecularized insofar as the stage of development of the human mind of whichit is the religious expression makes its appearance and becomes constitutedin its secular form. This takes place in the democratic state. Not Christianity,but the human basis of Christianity is the basis of this state.Religion remains the ideal, non-secular consciousness of its members, becausereligion is the ideal form of the stage of human development achieved inthis state.
We have, thus, shown that political emancipation from religionleaves religion in existence, although not a privileged religion. The contradictionin which the adherent of a particular religion finds himself involved inrelation to his citizenship is only one aspect of the universalsecular contradiction between the political state and civil society. Theconsummation of the Christian state is the state which acknowledges itselfas a state and disregards the religion of its members. The emancipationof the state from religion is not the emancipation of the real man fromreligion.
Therefore, we do not say to the Jews, as Bauer does: You cannotbe emancipated politically without emancipating yourselves radically fromJudaism. On the contrary, we tell them: Because you can be emancipatedpolitically without renouncing Judaism completely and incontrovertibly,political emancipation itself is not human emancipation. If youJews want to be emancipated politically, without emancipating yourselveshumanly, the half-hearted approach and contradiction is not in you alone,it is inherent in the nature and category of political emancipation.If you find yourself within the confines of this category, you share ina general confinement. Just as the state evangelizes when, although itis a state, it adopts a Christian attitude towards the Jews, so the Jewacts politically when, although a Jew, he demands civic rights.
Included among them is freedom of conscience, the right to practiceany religion one chooses. The privilege of faith is expressly recognizedeither as a right of man or as the consequence of a right of man, thatof liberty.
Liberty, therefore, is the right to do everything that harms noone else. The limits within which anyone can act without harmingsomeone else are defined by law, just as the boundary between two fieldsis determined by a boundary post. It is a question of the liberty of manas an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself. Why is the Jew, accordingto Bauer, incapable of acquiring the rights of man?
It is puzzling enough that a people which is just beginning toliberate itself, to tear down all the barriers between its various sections,and to establish a political community, that such a people solemnly proclaims(Declaration of 1791) the rights of egoistic man separated from his fellowmen and from the community, and that indeed it repeats this proclamationat a moment when only the most heroic devotion can save the nation, andis therefore imperatively called for, at a moment when the sacrifice ofall the interest of civil society must be the order of the day, and egoismmust be punished as a crime. (Declaration of the Rights of Man, etc., of1793) This fact becomes still more puzzling when we see that the politicalemancipators go so far as to reduce citizenship, and the political community,to a mere means for maintaining these so-called rights of man, that, therefore,the citoyen is declared to be the servant of egotistic homme, that the spherein which man acts as a communal being is degraded to a level below thesphere in which he acts as a partial being, and that, finally, it is notman as citoyen, but man as private individual [bourgeois] who is consideredto be the essential and true man.
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